row of sprites?

[row of sprites?]

I just added some little images so it will be clearer for people in the future:

 

randomterrain.com/atari-2600-memories-batari-basic-commands.html#nusiz

 

You'll probably need to refresh the page to make them show up.

That is a great idea and should make it clearer, but you should put these images in a third column in the table so that they all line up relative to one another horizontally.

[row of sprites?]

Oh I see ... so "three close copies of player" is the closest together they get then. alright.

[row of sprites?]

Yes but it doesn't seem to address that question. It shows how to change the size of the copies but not the distance between them. If it's not possible then I can deal with what I've got.

[row of sprites?]

Omegamatrix, I've been playing with your code example and it's brilliant stuff. I love it. It shows that what I am trying to do is not only totally possible using Batari Basic but might actually be much easier than I expected. I managed to get them in color with the ball appearing onscreen pretty easily, which is awesome!

 

Can I make these sprites appear closer together? They seem a little too far apart.

[row of sprites?]

Just a heads up: if both player0 and player1 are multi-color then you lose both missiles in batari BASIC

http://www.randomterrain.com/atari-2600-memories-batari-basic-commands.html#kernelopchart

 

So, your player would have to share the ball with the enemy for bullets

The enemy doesn't shoot. They chase you. They catch you if they succeed in getting too close. Only one bullet will ever appear on screen at a time and that's the player's bullet.

[row of sprites?]

Here is the mockup for my game so far.

 

The game is set in Massachusetts on the afternoon of April 19, 1775 during the aftermath of the Battle of Lexington. The British are marching/retreating back to Boston and you play as a colonial trying to get some of them on the road. YOLO in this game, because if they catch you then they hang you as a traitor.

 

I may want to add some playfield obstacles as well if I can and maybe also some rare enemy types (British officers ... and maybe George III) that might spawn sometimes if development time permits, but this is the basic concept.

 

(later edit) Oh, uh, the score counter keeps track of how many redcoats you've taken out.

[row of sprites?]

OK. I'll post a mock-up soon

[row of sprites?]

You guys assume I'm building Space Invaders. No, actually I'm building a stealthy action game. All my characters are people and there are no spaceships in this game. My rows of enemies are patrols of soldiers. ^_^

It sounds like I need to switch to three enemies at a time, which is OK.

 

My idea involved switching the playfield color at runtime ... not sure you guys grasped what I was saying. It would go like this:

 

1. Playfield is bullet colored

2. Fire at bad guy, bad guy dies

3. To show dead badguy, playfield color changes to same as background color, and covers up bad guy. You can't shoot while the dead guy's place is still onscreen.

4. When that patrol goes offscreen, the playfield color switches back to bullet color and you can shoot one from the next patrol.

 

However, if I can have a space inbeteen baddies then that makes things different and I wouldn't need this idea.

[row of sprites?]

If you use the Player replicate mode in that same way, there's only option for close or far spacing - with an enemy shot then moving the rest closer you'd not have the option for fine movement using the replicate mode.

 

If using both players to represent 4 objects but not in replicated mode then you'd have flicker as the players are representing 2 objects so only visible every 2nd frame. This is generally acceptable since the flicker is minimal when doing this.

None of the bad guys need to move relative to each other -- they just need to all move together, and sometimes at least one of them needs to be killable. If the guy in the middle gets killed then they all keep moving together with a blank spot in the middle where that guy used to be.

 

What I really want is five sprites on screen at a time -- the human player's avatar and one row of enemies, all these guys in color ... and a bullet. Preferably four enemies in the row if I can do it. Can I do this?

[row of sprites?]

I didn't mention that I want both my good guy and my rows of enemies to be in color.

 

It looks like to get both player0 and player1 to be in color, you need to set the kernel option "set kernel_options player1colors playercolors pfcolors" Please tell me if that is not correct. The cost for doing this is that I lose both missile0 and missile1, and that's horrible. Well, I thought of a clever way to get around that. Please tell me if this is a valid/good idea:

 

You can only hit one bad guy per row. (this is not ideal but OK, it works with my game concept and design) So I use the ball for bullet, then when it hits a bad guy, use the playfield to cover him up by changing the color of the playfield to the same as the color of the background while the guy is dead. Then you can't shoot again until his patrol is offscreen. I then change the playfield color back to the bullet color the next time you shoot so that the ball will be the bullet color.

 

This means I have to give up using any playfield obstacles, which is a bummer but an acceptable loss.

[row of sprites?]

1. I'm not super concerned about flicker as long as it doesn't get too bad.

 

2. I'm not building Space Invaders. That's been done to death.

 

3. I want these to be normal sized sprites, not 4x like Space Invaders. Does that make it easier?

 

4. I would like to have a horizontal row of baddies that moves. Shoot one bad guy and he should disappear but the rest of his buddies in the row should move together to chase you.

[Batari Basic alternate download]

Glad to hear it's back up. I had to use archive.org to get batari basic while it was down

[row of sprites?]

I know that the atari can draw more than just two sprites because Space Invaders has a whole row of them. So I thought of a game idea that would involve four or so enemy sprites all in a row moving together. If one dies, quit drawing that one. Is this doable with Batari Basic? From what I read, space invaders type stuff was being done by using the playfield to blank out sprites, and that wouldn't work here because the whole row, though they'd move together, would need to be free to move anywhere. How would you approach this problem?